1. Related Inventions
The present invention is related to the following commonly-assigned inventions, which were filed concurrently herewith: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/733,985, titled “Customized Subscription Builder” and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/734,043, titled “Intelligent Data Query Builder”. These co-pending applications are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
2. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer software, and deals more particularly with techniques for enabling end users to subscribe to information content, without requiring the end user to initiate the subscription process. User patterns are observed, and subscriptions are recommended based on these observations.
3. Description of the Related Art
In today's networked world, a user can be notified of events in a number of ways, including via their instant messaging client, e-mail client, or personal digital assistant (“PDA”). Unfortunately, however, users are limited to what they can be notified about because they are restricted to predetermined data feeds which are defined by other parties such as a software vendor or Web portal. Well-known examples of such data feeds include delivery of current weather, stock prices, and news to subscribers. Currently, the provider of the content is required to deploy a subscription interface that enables users to subscribe to content. Using the subscription interface, users indicate that they would like a particular data feed delivered to a client application over a communications network.
There are several drawbacks to existing techniques. If a content provider has not provided a subscription interface, then users are unable to subscribe to the content. Instead, they have to repeatedly take explicit action to continue viewing the content, such as returning to the content provider's Web page periodically. Another drawback of existing techniques is that, even if a subscription interface has been provided, it often does not have sufficient granularity to meet the needs or desires of end users. As a result, the user effectively gets no say as to what data feed is important to him/her. Furthermore, users may be unaware that they might benefit from a subscription to content. For example, novice users may not realize that a subscription-type function exists. As another example, users may not take time to notice that they repeatedly visit a particular content location to explicitly request updated content. Disadvantages are therefore realized not only by end users, but also by the content providers, who thereby fail to maximize exposure of their provided content (and as a result, may miss out on potential revenue).
The present invention provides novel techniques for enabling end users to subscribe to data feeds, without requiring the end user to initiate the subscription process.